Princess Sansa
by Second Star On The Left
Summary: Sansa Stark as various fairytale princesses, with a different prince in each tale.
1. By the pricking of my thumbs (Jaime)

It all began with the birth of a baby girl and three godparents and a jealous queen, but it will all end with a kiss.

It always seems to end with a bloody kiss, Jaime thinks, but he has to admit that this is the most absurd kiss of the whole bloody lot, mostly because he's the one supposed to administer it.

* * *

_"The fairest in the land!" Cersei shrieked, crystal smashing against the wall and rainbowing to the ground in a tinkle. "_I _am the fairest! She will not usurp me!"_

_"I doubt the child has thought of usurping you, sweet sister," Jaime said from the bed, folding his arms behind his head and grinning. "I imagine a babe of two moons has more pressing concerns. Nursing and shitting, for example."_

_She was raging that night, her nails sharp on his back, her teeth sharp on his neck and shoulders, and he told her that she was the most beautiful woman to have ever lived._

_She believed him, and for a time there was peace._

* * *

It all began when the babe was promised beauty and grace and goodness, two women and a man huddling around her cradle and clucking over her with varying degrees.

"She'd want to be very good indeed to be as good as _you've _made her look," Olenna sniffed at Maggy, folding her arms and scowling.

"And very graceful, too," Jon fretted, a frown twisting his mouth under his moustache. "Did you really have to make her quite so beautiful, Maggy? Olenna and I have a long labour ahead of us because of you."

Maggy just smiled and looked across the room, meeting Cersei Lannister's eyes for a moment before laughing.

Jaime remembers being there that day - well, everyone was there that day - and he hadn't seen anything about the child that marked her out as special. If only he'd known.

* * *

_"Those three are making her into everything I am supposed to be!" Cersei fumed and raged, storming up and down across her solar with her skirts swirling scarlet around her ankles. "I am the Queen! I am the fairest woman in the land! Not some snot-nosed Northern brat!"_

_"Whatever will you do, sister?" Jaime asked disinterestedly - Cersei's jealous tantrums were nothing new, after all - until he realised Cersei had stopped moving._

_"I will make sure she cannot replace me."_

* * *

Sansa Stark is terribly beautiful as she grows into her woman's body, her woman's face, and those godparents of hers are more fiercely protective of her even than her parents themselves.

But Sansa Stark is also susceptible to beauty and seemingly ignorant to the notion of evil in the world, and it is no great challenge for Cersei to befried her when she is fifteen and brought to court to share her beauty and grace and goodness with the world.

Jaime watches, annoyed with himself for noticing things like the slope of the girl's nose and the depth of her over-large blue eyes, but it is difficult not to notice such things when she always seems to stand where the light catches her to best advantage, when surrounding herself with other pretty girls only seems to make her seem prettier.

She never calls him Kingslayer, either. Always Ser Jaime. It's a rare one he hasn't at least overheard whispering about the Kingslayer, but he sometimes wonders if Sansa Stark is capable of the ill-will intended in his nickname. He doesn't think so.

* * *

_Cersei does not pace. She does not fume._

_"They will forget her," she says against his shoulder as she winds her arms around him, presses her breasts to his back. "She will be nothing, in time, just like Elia Martell and Lyanna Stark and Ashara Dayne."_

_Jaime does not say so, but he cannot imagine anyone ever forgetting Sansa Stark. Nobody ever forgets those truly worthy of Cersei's jealousy._

* * *

The whole realm seems to hold its breath when word spreads that some accident has befallen sweet Sansa, and her godparents three seem to panic.

Or rather, Olenna Tyrell and Jon Arryn panic. Maggy the Frog (how she became godmother to the child of one of the most important men in the realm will always escape Jaime) seems almost content as she bathes the girl's brow with rosewater and twines ribbons as blue as robin's eggs through her hair.

Jon Arryn in particular worries - the maesters say there is nothing they know that will wake the girl, nothing at all, and as Lord and Lady Stark lament, Jon Arryn, Olenna Tyrell and Maggy the Frog cluster around the girl.

And they wait.

* * *

"_Maggy tried to make her prophecy come true, the old bitch," Cersei crows, jubilant in her victory. "I saw to it that it won't."_

_"The girl yet lives," Jaime murmurs as they stand at the window and watch the Starks ride north, their lovely girl in a padded wagon. She sleeps, sleeps and sleeps and does not stir._

_"She will sleep for as long as she lives," Cersei says, a cruel twist to her smile and a malicious light in her eyes. "Nothing will wake her."_

_Maggy the Frog appears as if from nowhere in Jaime's rooms in the White Tower that night, and she says otherwise._

* * *

"The Queen is mad."

Everyone says it, louder now that Robert is dead than before, and as Jaime watches Cersei spiral deeper into the delirium of finally having power (because Joffrey, whatever his own madness, has no idea the power his mother is wielding over his small council) and feels sick.

This is not the woman he has loved all his life.

This is not the beautiful lioness of the Rock, proud and golden and perfect.

This is something else entirely.

* * *

_He kisses her and moves away, and she is first confused and then angry._

_"You cannot be without me," she hisses, her fingers tight around his wrist and that gleam in her eyes that makes him so sad. "We are one and the same, Jaime."_

_He thinks back on what Maggy said that night, that there is good in him if he escapes her poison._

_Her hand grips tighter, and he cannot pull away._

_"I sometimes wonder if we are," he says quietly, and he squeezes her wrist with his free hand until she lets go._

* * *

The old witch warned him, and she was right - things pour from beyond the Wall and the Starks send south for help.

Joffrey, horrible little shit that he is, refuses.

Jaime ignores Joffrey's orders, his father's and Cersei's, and rides north. He cannot quite explain why, but he somehow feels that the worse Cersei becomes, the better he should be, as if one of them must balance the other.

The Others are everywhere. The Starks and their people are barricaded in Winterfell, trapped behind ice and snow and death, cut off from the rest of the world and protected only by their hot springs.

Jaime has courted death his whole life (because he knew what might happen if he and Cersei were caught, he is not stupid, and he has always danced that line when he had a sword in his hand), and he does not fear it.

He refuses to fear these Others.

* * *

It is a long campaign. His hands are frozen so badly, are so stiff with chilblains, that it is an effort to wield his sword.

But they are winning. Jaime has never lost, and he does not intend to start now.

* * *

The Others breach the walls of Winterfell, and Jaime and his men (Addam among them, Addam who has lost two fingers and the tip of his nose to frostbite because he was too stubborn to wrap up well enough) charge after them, hoping that the enclosed space will give them an advantage.

It does. It bloody well does, even if Jaime has to chase the bastard things along madly twisting corridors, slipping and sliding on the frosty trails they leave behind them, even if he nearly cuts Ned Stark and his sons down more than once genuinely by accident.

Well, mostly by accident. Ned Stark is an obnoxious shit when he wants to be, which is most of the time.

Maggy's words echo in his ears as silence engulfs the castle. He is standing at the top of a great staircase, where he should be able to catch every bounce of sound in the place.

There is nothing.

He walks along the halls, wiping the queer oily-icy residue from his sword as he goes, and is too tired to question where he is going.

And then he sees her.

"Damned witch," he curses under his breath as he takes in Sansa Stark's still sleeping form, wondering what it was Cersei did to the girl to leave her like this.

Her hair is fire-bright on the pale blue of her pillow, and her lips pearly pink.

"Can't hurt," he decides, thinking on the absurdity of kissing this woman-child on the word of a mad old bat who had helped drive Cersei to insanity. He has only ever kissed a handful of women before - Cersei, but that is gone, his mother just before she birthed Tyrion, the back of Elia Martell's hand before he returned to Aerys' side - and so he feels awkward when he kneels at Sansa's bedside (she is near a stranger, if nothing else) and brushes his lips against hers.

She is warm. He assumed she would be cold.

Her eyes open slowly, the same robin's egg blue as the ribbons in her hair, and she smiles.

"I did not expect you," she says, and her fingertips touch the frostburn on his cheek. "One like you, mayhaps, but not you."

He raises an eyebrow.

"There are none like me," he tells her, standing up and crossing the room to where someone (he sense the witch's hand in this) has left a washbasin and a jug of water. "Only me."


	2. Let down your hair (Harry)

Petyr brings Alayne out and shows her off, but Sansa is kept locked away high in the ivory towers of the Eyrie.

Sansa does not mind, not really - there are terrible fates awaiting her if she descends from her sanctuary, and she has Sweetrobin here, who is becoming sweeter under her care. She has Mya, too, and Randa sometimes, and she supposes that better to be here and a little lonely than to be down there and dead.

Petyr talks about arranging a marriage for her, but she sometimes wonders if he ever truly intends on releasing her - he likes too much keeping her to himself, she knows that, she thinks everyone must know that by now, so she does not pay much heed to the talk of Harry the Heir.

Then, somehow, she meets Harry.

* * *

"My lady Alayne?" he asks, and her eyes are enormous and blue and the loveliest eyes he has ever seen, and the lamplight casts copper in her nut-brown hair. "I- I know that I am not supposed to be here, but-"

"You are Lord Hardyng?" she asks, and oh but her voice is so sweet, and Harry wonders if this is what it is to fall in love for true.

"Aye, my lady. I am Harrold. Harry. Yes."

He has never been tongue-tied before, has always found words come to him easily, but Alayne Stone, bastard daughter of a man of no importance made good by subterfuge (Lady Anya had been very insistent on that point), she has thrown him for a loop just by smiling shyly.

Her hair is piled up on the back of her head but for a few tendrils that curl darkly against the pale skin of her long, slender neck, and that somehow makes her seem younger and terribly fragile, and Harry feels as if he should offer her his sword and shield right now.

Instead, he smiles.

"It is a great pleasure to finally meet you, my lady," he insists. "Your name has echoed throughout the Vale since your father's arrival. It would be an honour if you would allow me to speak with you some."

Footsteps echo down the hallway. Harry turns in annoyance to see who it is that is interrupting them, but Alayne pushes at his arm, pushes him away.

"Tomorrow evening," she whispers. "But you must go, you must leave-"

So he leaves, as quietly as he can, and he plans how he might woo her tomorrow evening.

* * *

She lets him woo her.

Or rather, she seems unaware that he is wooing her, but she seems to enjoy his company anyways - making her laugh becomes the highlight of Harry's day, because when she sits at her father's side during the day she is remote, cool and distant and removed from everything, but in the evenings when they sit together by the fire in her solar (always hers, never his) and talk in whispers, sometimes she tilts her head back and laughs a high, sweet giggle that makes him smile in return.

He always leaves an hour before midnight lest her father catch them, but within a fortnight Harry is completely certain that he is in love with Alayne Stone and that he wants to marry her.

* * *

He does not mean to kiss her, but he does.

It is just that she is so beautiful in the firelight, her cheeks flushed pink with summerwine and her lips stained red with berry tarts, and she tastes of summer when her lips part under his.

"I- Alayne, I should not have-"

She kisses him the second time, and her father almost catches them.

* * *

"What do you want from life, sweetling?" he asks against her hair as she lies with her back to his chest, their feet stretched out towards the fire. Her gown today is the exact blue of her eyes, and the sight of her had fair stolen his breath this morning.

"Home," she whispers. "Safety, but mostly home."

"The Fingers? I was told that they were a barren sort of place - do you miss them?"

She hesitates, shoulders tensing, and then she turns her face up to his.

"The Fingers have never been my home."

"Where, then? Did you live with your mother? I thought your father-"

"He is not my father," she whispers urgently, turning to kneel between his legs, to take his face in her hands. "Harry, Littlefinger is not my father, my name is not Alayne - you must believe me."

If not Alayne, then...

"Who are you?" he asks, sitting up straight, the lovely softness of the evening gone completely. "Who?"

There is such naked terror in her eyes that he feels half afraid himself.

"Sansa," she says at last, barely more than a breath. "Sansa Stark, of Winterfell."

* * *

Knowing that her hair should be bright red and that she is rightful heir to all the lands between the Neck and the Wall (gods, rightful lady of Winterfell) does not change the fact that Harry has fallen quite thoroughly in love with Alayne- with Sansa, and so he continues to go to her every evening.

Now she tells him stories of her childhood, brothers and sister and parents who she clearly loved very much, tells him of playing in the godswood between kisses and of snowball fights in the yard as he works his hand under her skirts and kisses her neck.

She protests at first, but then one evening she says something so sad that, if she had not said it with her hand inside his breeches, would have made him draw away from her that moment and never dare lay a hand on her again.

"I will never get home," she breathes against his ear, slender fingers curling around him, "so what difference does a torn maidenhead make?"

The likelihood of an annulment, he remembers, because she told him of her Lannister husband amidst tears one night, but it is hard to worry about such things when she feels so good, so right, in his arms.

* * *

Her assertion aside, he never, ever intended on laying with her, not until he could prove that her husband was dead and could make her his.

But, Harry has never precisely been famed for his self-control, and he has never felt about another woman the way he feels about beautiful, broken Sansa Stark with her smouldering hair and her blue eyes as deep as the sea.

"I love you," he whispers when he breaks her maidenhead, the firelight glowing on their skin and in her hair and glistening on the wet pink of her mouth. "I love you, I love you-"

* * *

He leaves soon after, Lady Anya's business with Lord Baelish concluded, and he has but one last night with Sansa during which he tries to assure her that he will make everything right, that he will keep her safe and give her a home.

That is the last time he sees her for a very long while.

* * *

"The maester tells me you asked him for moon tea, sweetling," Petyr says, voice gentle and eyes diamond hard. "I cannot imagine why you should have need of such a thing, though. Surely you have not ruined yourself, my dear?"

Sansa says nothing, not knowing what she is supposed to say in the face of Petyr's not-well-enough hidden anger. She cannot imagine how angry her parents would be, knowing that she allowed Harry to dishonour her, allowed him to get a bastard on her (not a bastard, a babe, our babe, mine and Harry's, ours).

"He will not wed you now," Petyr sneers. "He has another bastard, one more will make no difference to such a fool."

Sansa does not say that Harry loves her, that she _knows _he loves her, wants to be with her, wants to make her his wife. She does not say that the only time she has felt truly safe since her father's death has been in Harry's arms, that the only way she can see herself happy in the future is as Harry's wife.

"You will spend some time away," he declares. "There are motherhouses in Oldtown where I am known as a generous man - they will take my shamed daughter and hide her ruin."

Sansa cannot remain silent at that, cries out in horror and jerks away from Petyr, wrapping her arms around her belly, still flat but alive, a tiny babe with her eyes and Harry's lovely soft hair already growing within her, she cannot let Petyr take her babe away from her-

"You will leave by the end of the week," he says. "You will return here when your time is over. No man will have a ruined woman, the Imp's widow, but you will return - Winterfell is still yours, regardless of your state, I suppose."

"I should be allowed keep the child," she dares to say, "if no man will be my husband. I will still need an heir."

There is a gleam in his eyes, an angry gleam that she is frightened of.

"You will leave the babe in Oldtown as I said," he tells her. "How are you to retake the North if you have a babe to look after?"

* * *

Harry returns to the Eyrie four moons after his first visit, and it is his little cousin who tells im that Alayne was bad and had to go away for a while.

His temper gets the better of him (it rarely does, but now, Sansa is gone, she is _gone, _how can she be gone just when he has found confirmation that the Imp is dead, how can she be gone?!) and he confronts Littlefinger.

"You've shamed the last daughter of one of the oldest Houses in Westeros," he smarms, even with Harry's forearm tight against his neck. "Who'd have you for a husband now?"

"Sansa-"

"Is safe away from you. You will not find her."

"Robert said- he said that she had to go away because she got fat," Harry forces out. "Is she with child? My child?"

"How unlike you to show concern for your children," Littlefinger sneers, his green-grey eyes flashing cold and angry. "Lady Stark would be thankful for your concern after you getting a bastard on her."

"Tell me where she is," Harry snarls, not noticing Baelish's bully boys until it is too late, until they are pulling him away. "Tell me where she is!"

"Oldtown is the second largest city in the realm," Littlefinger calls. "And you're going there blind."

* * *

Blind indeed, Harry thinks as he and Wallace leave the fifth motherhouse since they arrived in Oldtown.

"I have to find her," Harry says desperately. "I have to, Wally, I- I can't go home without her. I have to find her."

"We will," Wally assures him, even though neither one of them is sure that Lady Anya will welcome them home to Ironoaks because they went against her will to come look for Sansa. "We will, Harry, just you wait and see."

* * *

He waits and waits, and he meets more red-haired girls with big bellies than he thought there could possibly be in the realm, but none of them are _his _red-haired girl (would they have stripped the dye from her hair? He doesn't know, doesn't know anything, he thinks now).

He dreams about her every night, alone and frightened, heavy and round with their babe, her hair clinging to her neck and her shoulders, fire-red and nut-brown and every colour in between, her eyes so big and so frightened, like the night she told him her true name but worse, more scared.

Harry has never had to be responsible for anything before, has never wanted that, but he wants more than anything to be responsible for Sansa and their babe.

* * *

The girls in the motherhouses are expected to work for their keep, even those for whom the women running the places are being well paid to keep secret, keep hidden.

Sansa is one such girl, but because she has been so sick with her pregnancy she has only light work to do - sweeping the floor in the front room where they all eat their meals, helping a little in the kitchens, that sort of thing. She and the other girls must wear their hair bound up under tight scarves ("Vanity and pride's what brought you here, we'll soon rid you of that").

She is sweeping the floor, her back aching and her ankles so swollen they hurt, when she hears his voice.

Harry. Her Harry, looking exhausted and older than he should, his hair in disarray and his clothes travelworn.

He came for her. Petyr said he wouldn't, but he has, he is here for her, she throws aside her broom and pulls off her headscarf, not caring that her hair is red to the tops of her ears and dark brown beyond that, not caring about anything but the light in Harry's eyes.

"Take me home," she begs, burrowing against his chest as best the swell of her belly allows (six moons, six long and lonely moons, near seven) and and he holds her close, holds her tight in his arms, and promises to do just that.

* * *

Dragons come and Jon Snow is Jon Targaryen and the Lannisters and Boltons and Freys burn.

Rickon disappears in the night from White Harbour, him and his wolf and his wildling woman.

When Sansa sits in her father's seat in Winterfell, Harry stands at her side with little Brandon in his arms.

"There must always be a Stark in Winterfell," she says as they stand before the heart tree, Brandon standing unsteadily between them and holding their hands.

Brandon has Harry's hair and Sansa's eyes.

"I'd hoped he'd have your hair," Harry admits after they've put Brandon to bed later that night, their first night in Winterfell. "It was your hair that I loved first."

"Even when it was dark?"

"More so now," he admits, "but there was fire in it even when it was dark, love."

"Kissed by fire," she breathes, rolling over into his arms. "The wildlings say it's lucky."

"It has been for you," he points out. "This is as close to a happy ending as life allows, after all."


End file.
